Number Sense Disambiguation

Word Sense Disambiguation is a well studied field, with a range of successful methods. However, there has been little work on examining the analogue for numbers, classifying them into senses (‘year’, ‘date’, ‘telephone number’ etc.) based on their context potentially useful for Text to Speech and Information Extraction systems. We extend the semi-supervised Decision List model described by David Yarowsky (1994), bringing the model to a problem on which little work has been done. We report promising results and present a thorough error analysis which highlights several areas where the current methodology needs to be extended to deal better with number senses. We conclude by proposing several directions for future work.